Pidgins are usually described as lacking inflections, lacking articles, lacking markers of tense and aspect, lacking sentence-embedding, nominalization, allomorphic variation, etc., and people conclude from such definitions that all pidgins are more or less the same; it would, in fact, be as reasonable to suppose that a brick is the same as a cabbage because neither has legs, wings, fur, feathers, independent locomotion, etc., etc.
- Bickerton (1977), Pag. 55

Since the most widely distributed features of language are usually the least complex, and since […] pidgins have little transformational depth, i.e., relatively few differences between deep and surface structures, the possibility that pidgins were somehow closer to language universals looked a good bet to scholars who, for the most part, lacked any first-hand experience of early-stages pidgins.
- Bickerton (1977), Pag. 56